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Developers in 120 countries around the world can now register for and submit applications to the Windows Store. Registering costs $99 a year for corporations, $49 a year for individuals, and is free for a year for MSDN and DreamSpark members.

Some developers have already had access to the store, and at the time of writing there are 1033 apps available; mostly free, but a few paid.

Apps will be on sale in 231 different markets, with the full list available here. Seventy-five of the markets will take payments in their local currency; the rest will be paid in euros or US dollars.

With Visual Studio Express available to download and time-limited Windows 8 RTM evaluation copies available to anyone, developers now have everything they need to start producing Metro-style applications. Windows 8's Metro environment needs a killer application: now the door is open.

Windows 8's Metro environment needs a killer application: now the door is open.

It's worrisome that Metro doesn't have a killer app this late in the game. Where is the SkiFree of Windows 8? Surely some Microsoft employee somewhere has made some crazy little program which could be used to demonstrate the benefits of Metro.

I personally don't find the idea of a Windows Store very compelling. It just seems like a "me too" bandwagon everyone jumped on after Apple's App store. We don't need walled gardens everywhere, sometimes we need strip malls, public parks, and national forests.

I wouldn't mind a sort of Humble Indie Bundle for applications rather than games, with compelling software made available cross-platform.

I personally don't find the idea of a Windows Store very compelling. It just seems like a "me too" bandwagon everyone jumped on after Apple's App store. We don't need walled gardens everywhere, sometimes we need strip malls, public parks, and national forests.

Of course it's a "me too" to Apple's app store. The difference is, about 90% of people own Windows PCs instead of OSX machines, so this will be the first opportunity for 90% of the market to tap into this sort of experience. And with Apple's PC lineup nearly entirely over the $1,000 mark, that market share is not going to change any time soon. So Microsoft is wise to offer a similar option to the majority of people who own $400-$800 computers instead of $2,200 Retina MacBook Pros.

But regardless, it's not a "walled garden" on x86 devices (OSX or Windows). It's one avenue to buy software *but not the only one*. You can install third-party apps (Steam programs, Amazon.com purchased software, or heaven forbid, stuff you bought at a brick-and-mortar store on a DVD-ROM) on both OSX machines and x86 Windows machines. It's only a walled garden for ARM devices (iOS or Windows RT/Windows Phone).

Does nobody else feel that this practice of having to buy an yearly license to develop and sell software is a BAD trend - set by Apple and now being adopted by the rest of the herd? This practice defies common sense.

You have to buy a computer because you are buying a product built out of physical parts. You are paying to cover the material and workmanship costs there.

You buy software because that too is a product. Here you are paying for the labor, idea and quite possibly the marketing and packaging costs there.

But to have to pay to earn the right to develop software is beyond words! There is no justification for it except greed and control and foolishness of eager developers.

This is like buying a pen and a paper, but then to also have to 'buy' the right to use them. The right to use the pen, or paper, or both, once bought, has to be implicit in the original purchase. This is not something extra. Computers are meant to be a versatile tool. Once you buy it, you can develop and write and sell software without any further purchases. These subsequent purchases are just plain extortion - especially when they are the only means to develop software.

Point-of-view difference aside, this is a BAD idea in other ways too. In many parts of the world, $50 or $100 are large enough sum of money to be practically out of reach. This $100 entrance fee to the software developers' club basically makes it exclusive to only those who can afford it and completely disregards their intellectual prowess or software development abilities.

Instead of making efforts to ensure that more and more people can turn to software development easily, and to reduce the bar of entry; the industry, in its greed, seems perfectly content in opting for the exact opposite. One reason software industry thrived and boomed was that developing software was a cheap endeavor. All you needed was a computer; rest was all there for the hardworking person. But first Apple, and now MS (and soon everybody else, I guess) is going to make it - the practice of developing software - just another opportunity to profit their business. In the long run, it is going to be bad for the software industry as a whole.

Try as I might, I just can't seem to see any reasonable justification for this developer license fee - or for the license itself to begin with. My computer and software is and ought to be all the license that I should ever need; and if I can borrow that; then even that should suffice.

Does nobody else feel that this practice of having to buy an yearly license to develop and sell software is a BAD trend - set by Apple and now being adopted by the rest of the herd? This practice defies common sense.

For Visual Studio at least there's no cost beyond the product to *develop* Win8 apps. And VS Express is free and I believe will also let you write Win8 apps. You only have to pay to submit/sell the apps in the app store. And the submission does need to be funded for two very good reasons:1) It helps prevent abuse of the submission system by providing a light barrier to submit and2) It also costs money to run the systems that handle submissions.

$50/$100 per year seems like a pretty small fee for even a one-man development shop. Even multiplied out across a few app stores it doesn't seem that bad.

For Visual Studio at least there's no cost beyond the product to *develop* Win8 apps.

You obviously have not tried to do so. This is true for a WPF/Winforms app or service or driver, etc. In fact you don't even have to use visual studio - you can use notepad and csc.exe (for c#, or a c/c++ compiler of your choosing)

If you try to open a metro application project it actually logs into micosoft to check your developer account is up to date, it also registers your local machine as being allowed to run unsigned metro applications as you cannot run them without deploying them to your machine (i.e. side-loading them)All of this requires the annual fee to be paid and up to date.

If you try to open a metro application project it actually logs into micosoft to check your developer account is up to date, it also registers your local machine as being allowed to run unsigned metro applications as you cannot run them without deploying them to your machine (i.e. side-loading them)All of this requires the annual fee to be paid and up to date.

Nope, it doesn't actually. I'm learning to develop WinRT apps and I can test them just fine on my dev machine without paying Microsoft any money. It's only when it comes to submitting an app that I'll have to pay. Contrast this with iOS, where you can play around with Xcode and the emulator, but you're forced to pay the fee even if you want to just *test* your app on an iOS device.

Also, regarding the concern about $50 being a lot of money in other parts of the world - if a person lives in a third-world country but can afford a computer and an internet connection, I'm pretty sure they can afford $50. The only difference is that they're comparatively rich compared to the average person in their country.

Windows 8's Metro environment needs a killer application: now the door is open.

It's worrisome that Metro doesn't have a killer app this late in the game. Where is the SkiFree of Windows 8? Surely some Microsoft employee somewhere has made some crazy little program which could be used to demonstrate the benefits of Metro.

the skifree of windows 8 is sequestered away in a secure memory segment, along with the chip's challenge of windows 8 and the canyon.mid of windows 8. as a mere licensee of the windows 8 "not metro" environment, you are "not permitted" to actually access content that nonetheless occupies a portion of your hard drive. this is a thinly disguised psychological ploy: if you lock things up for long enough, people will forget it was open in the first place. then you can sell the access back out in tiny portions for $$$

Does nobody else feel that this practice of having to buy an yearly license to develop and sell software is a BAD trend - set by Apple and now being adopted by the rest of the herd? This practice defies common sense.

(...)

But to have to pay to earn the right to develop software is beyond words! There is no justification for it except greed and control and foolishness of eager developers.

(...)

There is: each submitted app will be reviewed and while a part of the process is automated, another one will be done by humans. This is what the fee will be used for.Note you can still develop apps and other things, you'll need to pay only if you want to submit Metro apps in the Windows Store.

Since MS needs all the apps it can get I am surprised they would have a fee or any barriers for developers at all.

There should be no developer fee and any cost of running the MS app store to MS should come from MS cut it takes from developers.

Only a 1000 apps isn't a very good sign even if it was limited to only some countries. Developers have been able to start developing apps for a while now, and I would think alot of developers would want their apps in the store at launch.

Developer interest in Windows 8 so far looks a bit soft, unless MS is purposely making itself look bad by waiting on approving thousands of apps, which makes the app approval process looks bad if true.

This is like buying a pen and a paper, but then to also have to 'buy' the right to use them. The right to use the pen, or paper, or both, once bought, has to be implicit in the original purchase. This is not something extra. Computers are meant to be a versatile tool. Once you buy it, you can develop and write and sell software without any further purchases. These subsequent purchases are just plain extortion - especially when they are the only means to develop software.

...

You, sir, have nailed it. Buying a pen and paper is a great analogy. Paying to play on the Apple App Store, Google Play, and Microsoft App Store is similar to paying a publisher to publish your works. Its not a direct analogy, because usually publishers find you, then pay you something up front and then some extra for each copy sold. The "app store" way charges you $99 and then gives you 70% of each copy sold.

First, you are not required to use the app store to publish your works, you can distribute them online via your website (that said, you can't install iPad, iPhone, WP7, or WinRT apps on the side, but I digress). If you want to have Microsoft, Apple, or Google host your files, allow users to download them, and collect money from the users and give you a cut, a $99 fee up front every year doesn't seem too bad. If it were $9,999 or something + a 30% cut, I might be singing a different toon.

If I worked for Microsoft the first thing I would do is find someone who could market Microsoft and its products much better. Then I would fire anyone who goes against what the core Microsoft product users want. Obviously someone at Microsoft thinks going against the grain is a popular path. At what point has their been so much negative or lack of interest in almost every product Microsoft makes. No I do not hate Microsoft and if the truth be told I think they can do way better work then Apple if you really look close at what both companies do and how popular world wide these two are. In comparison Apple is a dwarf when it comes to worldwide acceptance. Sure Apple has some strong support in America and even some in Europe. But its not big like Windows. What Apple has is great marketing and the ability of that marketing to not only inspire consumers to impulse buy Apple products, but to also create such a marketing hype long before a product ever reaches the shelves. Even the media is manipulated into helping Apple spread this hype and it works very well. Microsoft to stay where it is as a leader in operating systems, and applications. Must find people that can use this same influence to hype and use consumers impulse buying habits to its advantage. People do not instantly get excited about products. They are manipulated into getting excited. Microsoft just puts a product in the public and expects everyone to be impressed. It does not work that way anymore. The hype is as important to a product as the quality and price.

Also, regarding the concern about $50 being a lot of money in other parts of the world - if a person lives in a third-world country but can afford a computer and an internet connection, I'm pretty sure they can afford $50. The only difference is that they're comparatively rich compared to the average person in their country.

That is not true. They may not be in a position to afford $50 every year. Unless you really can recover that money from the sales of your game or product, that is money down the drain. Also for whatever money they bought their computer, that constitutes a one-time expense for which they get a device which they can now use for next several years without additional recurring expenses.

Also it assumes that you are rich enough to own a computer. That is not entirely true. You may be given a computer. I know this because that is how we got our first computer - through some educational grant my mother received as a teacher. Had it not been that, we would not have been in a position to buy a computer ourselves. I used that 8086 PC for the next 6-7 years and learned basically everything I could on my own on that computer. It wasn't until university days again that I was able to work on a Pentium PC. And to give a perspective, back then, the only recurring expense was that of buying floppy disks - which was a difficult stretch for me. Buying a hard-disk was out of question.

So, $50, even onetime, maybe too much for someone; recurring; it is a bad deal altogether!

For Visual Studio at least there's no cost beyond the product to *develop* Win8 apps.

You obviously have not tried to do so. This is true for a WPF/Winforms app or service or driver, etc. In fact you don't even have to use visual studio - you can use notepad and csc.exe (for c#, or a c/c++ compiler of your choosing)

If you try to open a metro application project it actually logs into micosoft to check your developer account is up to date, it also registers your local machine as being allowed to run unsigned metro applications as you cannot run them without deploying them to your machine (i.e. side-loading them)All of this requires the annual fee to be paid and up to date.

I'm writing a Metro app right now and I don't have a store/dev account. So I'm pretty confident, actually. It does do the second thing (setting the bit on the machine that allows you to run unsigned metro apps) but that is also free. Again, it is totally free to write/test your own Windows (or phone) apps. It only costs money when you want to sell them on their respective marketplace.

Does nobody else feel that this practice of having to buy an yearly license to develop and sell software is a BAD trend

No, what is a bad trend is 13-year-old script kiddies uploading their completely useless and pointless meme apps to a platform that is actually for the rest of us (should we choose to use it). I don't want to wade through the equivalent of a digital landfill of crap to find one or two apps that are of interest to me (should I ever migrate to Win8).

It's low enough to not be an issue for serious developers and high enough to deter the morons. And anything that protects me from the kwazillion morons out there is a good thing. And if it stops one poor Philippine student from submitting his app, I'm sorry for him, but you have to place the bar somewhere.